Carroll: Nose knows

Monday

The nose sticks right out in the front of our faces. You can't miss it. Mine has got me in trouble more than once.

My most recent public nose problem was falling on my nose in church in front of everyone, but I've told that story before and since it doesn't make me feel good, I won't tell it again.

If you really want to hear it, ask anyone in my church.

Falling on your face in church gives you church immortality. No one will ever forget you. Generations later will be passing on the story of the woman who fell on her nose and bled all over the place while she was dressed as a witch and waving a broom. I was dressed as a character from the "Wizard of Oz" so forget the rumors that I may be a little witchey now and then or was that something else?

Some years ago I learned that my nose is more in charge than my brain and that may have been the case that Sunday morning when I gained my church immortality. I was sorry to learn the nose is in charge since I have never seen my brain. I assumed it was much smarter and prettier than my nose.

The nose is necessary for breathing, inhaling and exhaling, identifying substances and protecting the lungs and stomach from poisonous foods, drinks or gases. The nose filters our air, helps the way we speak and it even makes us turn over in bed at night. If that isn't in charge, what is?

When we sleep on our sides or stomachs, we bury one nostril, causing the other nostril to do all the work of supplying the body with oxygen. When the exposed nostril gets tired of working, it shuts off the air supply momentarily, which causes us to turn our heads to maintain an air supply. This movement of the head triggers movement of the body, which explains why we turn over in our sleep.

The nose is busy but we don't give conscious thought to how busy it is. Everyday we breathe 23,040 times; we inhale and exhale 438 cubic feet of air. I'm sure this varies and the scientists who figured this out probably monitored a lot of inhaling and exhaling. What a job.

The scientists have broken all this air down in how much nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and thousands of other minor components we get in one sniff. No wonder we often have that stuffy feeling.

It doesn't matter if the air we breathe is cold, dry, dusty or clean, our wonderful nose makes sure the lungs gets warm, most and clean air. With all this work to do it is amazing that the nose has any time to get into other people's business.

I am now against nose rings. Anything this important and efficient cannot be improved on by man.

Our sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than our sense of taste. Our nose contains 10 to 20 million odor receptor cells in two patches about the side of a postage stamp. Those busy, nosy scientists have figured this all out.

Our most ancient of ancestors knew how important scents are and so they developed perfumes. The Greeks and Romans saturated the wings of doves with scents and released them at banquets to fly over the guests showering them with delicate droplets of perfume.

Knowing the habits of birds, I don't recommend this, particularly at a banquet.

From the fall of Rome through the 18th century, soap and water were looked upon with disdain in Europe. Proper bathing facilities didn't exist and devout Christians looked on bathing as a heathen practice. No one is yearning for those good old days.

In early America, the Puritans condemned soap, water and fragrance, but American Indians made torch candles from fragrant pine branches and boiled bayberries to produce a wax with a fragrant aroma as a symbol of hospitality. That sounds nice even today.

Smelling good didn't catch on with Americans until the late 1940s, but now we try to please our nose. Just imagine what the noses had to endure before baths caught on.

When Americans got into smelling good they went for it in a big way. Americans spend well over 3 billion every year on perfumes, colognes and after-shaves to scent our bodies and fill our lives with glorious odors.

Scientists say that we are scented even without perfume.

Everyone has his own fragrance identity, unique scent-prints that I assume are like fingerprints except there is no way to identify them. Each part of the human body has a particular odor determined by one's genes, sex, skin type, hair color, diet, age and physical and mental illnesses.

Theoretically, we should be able to recognize each other by smell. I know of a few cases where I could prove that theory but we won't go there.

All day the nose takes in a wide variety of odors and deposits them in our memory bank where it is there forever. We only notice an odor when it irritates or pleases us. I believe odors are in our memory bank. If I could walk into my grandmother's kitchen with my eyes closed I would know where I was. I would love to smell that one more time.

Ah, the nose. It makes us turn over in bed, filters everything, remembers everything and is mainly unappreciated.

Where would our language be without the nose? You couldn't thumb your nose at someone you don't like. You couldn't show disdain by turning up your nose. You couldn't keep that nose to the grindstone or win by a nose or get your nose out of joint. And luckily, you couldn't take a nose dive or cut off your nose to spite your face.

Isn't all this as plain as the nose on your face?

Louise Carroll can be reached online at wlc7@verizon.net.

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